Conclusion

C

C

distribution, too, but for a different reason: Both determiners in Icelandic can contain both features, and therefore it is – at least theoretically – possible to use either in modified contexts. In fact, however, the suffixed article is used in all contexts, whether modified or not. Why the two determiners have the same content in Icelandic as opposed to split features in the other Scandinavian languages has been shown to originate from different diachronic developments.

The investigation of the adjectival inflection has confirmed the hypothesis that the weak form of the inflection contributes to the meaning of the phrase and interacts with definiteness. This contribution can be describes as the identification of subsets in the sense that the members of the denotation of adjective and noun are selected. The contribution of the adjectival inflection to the interpretation of the phrase leaves its mark in the structure of the DP, where the adjectival inflection heads its own functional projection, FP.

The nature of nouns and that of partitives have also influenced the structure of the DP suggested in this thesis. Based on the behaviour of nouns, I have claimed that nouns cannot be classified pre-syntactically but that the interpretation of nouns depends on syntax and syntactic operations. These findings were supported not only by psycholinguistic experiments and neurolinguistic data, but also by the discussion on partitive structures, which has shown that there is a very close relation between Germanic bare plural/mass noun constructions and Romance defective partitives and that these structure can be analysed alike. Those findings have led to the introduction of a classifier phrase, ClassP, into the structure of the DP. Nouns enter the derivation without being classified as mass or count, and move to the head of ClassP if they are to be interpreted as so-called count nouns, object mass nouns or type-shifted mass nouns.

The claim that utterances should be analysed alike if they mean the same has been a guiding theme throughout the discussion. This demand actually could be met in that it was shown that all the different kinds of definite marking in Scandinavian – including the dialect data – can be accounted for by assuming one single syntactic structure. This simple structure employs – apart from the phrases mentioned above – two DP layers that host the definiteness features. Depending on the distribution of these features on the D-nodes, a second determiner is, or is not, introduced, resulting

in the patterns mentioned above, namely double definiteness in some of the Scandinavian languages and simple definiteness in others.

The interplay of the three functional morphemes involved in modified definite DPs in the Scandinavian languages has been supported by facts from superlative constructions and from relative clauses, whose affects regarding the marking of definiteness go along with the functions identified for the respective morphemes under discussion. Interestingly, parts of these functions can be found, too, in other doubling patterns, such as Greek Determiner Spreading and Romanian cel-structures. This not only supports the claim made in this thesis that doubling of definiteness markers is not a mere agreement phenomenon but it also establishes that discourse reference is clearly involved – at least to some extent – in all the cases of doubling patterns investigated.

As opposed to the traditional view that morphology creates words and syntax takes these words as input, I hope to have shown that an analysis which assumes that syntax and morphology are not two different modules (but rather that morphology reflects syntactic structure and that interpretation depends on syntactic structure), is able to capture the empirical data found in the Scandinavian languages. In my view it is also important to note that it is not only the focus on grammar – in this case an approach on the interfaces between modules of grammar – that has led to the findings presented in this thesis. Diachronic investigations, which can explain certain facts and support the hypotheses here put forth, have also been of importance.

2 Further research

Despite the findings presented here and summarized above, the discussion of DPs and its reflex in Scandinavian is obviously in need of further research. There were many things that lay outside the core claims of this thesis and so have to await further investigation and discussion.

The function of the adjectival inflection in Danish, for example, has not been dealt with, and it would be interesting to see if similar patterns – or remnants of them – can be found in there. Furthermore, possessive structures in Scandinavian are still

awaiting an account of placement tendencies, as are genitive structures, especially in Icelandic. Moreover, it would be interesting to investigate DPs when modified by PPs. Modified indefinite DPs, specifically the multiple exponence of the adjectival article in some variants of Scandinavian are in need of further research as well as the absence of the suffixed article in nominalized adjectives.

Regarding an approximate universal structure of DPs, it would also be of great interest to investigate the relations of nominals cross-linguistically; specifically the question of why some languages do not have object mass nouns and what the relation among languages is like, which nouns tend to be understood as quantifying over individuals and which as quantifying over kinds.

Even if there are many topics that are in need of further research, and even though the analysis presented here could be improved, I very much hope that I am on the right track and that this thesis can contribute to the discussion of the structure of the DP.

R

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